There was more to the London Contemporary Music Festival than I previously let on, such as Melinda Maxwell playing an improvisation on an aulos and Kurdish songs sung by Dengbêj Ali Tekbaş with accompaniment on duduk by Murat Savaş, which open up a different perspective on the events overall. As supposed totem for this year’s festival, the Trickster gradually emerged over the four nights as a figure offering more substance than simple misdirection. The third night featured the LCMF Orchestra, which couldn’t help but appear more substantial. They began the evening with Yves Klein’s Monotone-Silence Symphony, a notorious work typically more contemplated than heard. In a reversal of much of the first two nights’s performances, something often mistakenly considered as a conceptual work was revealed as a piece that’s at least as impressive as a musical experience as it is as an idea. Inside Hackney Church, the orchestra made the air come alive with both the presence of sound and its absence, first playing a D Major chord for twenty minutes before resolving into a resonant silence of equal duration. The boldness of its structure creates a tension that plays upon our expectations and anticipations, while also signalling a number of musical attributes that would gain currency in the half-century or so following its composition: drones, diatonicism, steady dynamics, silence. It held the punters, partly thanks to conductor Jack Sheen’s valiant effort to stand still with his arms extended for forty minutes.
Not much later, Sheen was also required to throw shapes and then add spoken narration to the premiere of Maggie Nicols’ work for voices and orchestra Our Wits About Us, one of the cross-disciplinary events LCMF likes to try out. As on most other occasions, it was a fun and curious experience but ultimately ephemeral in a way that makes it better considered as a good old-fashioned Happening than as a composition. Looking back over the programmes for the last two nights I’m shocked to find that I’m struggling to remember a bunch of the pieces which I heard barely a week ago. This wasn’t a problem for the first two nights; possibly it’s true after all that it’s better for art to irritate than amuse.
That being the case, I’m going to jump ahead to the end of the Festival (not quite: there’s another event in January) when the Christmas lights went up on the balcony railings and Charlemagne Palestine was let loose on the Hackney Church organ to play SCHLINGENNN TRICKSTERRR BLÄNGENNN!!!!!!!! Palestine had played at the first LCMF and so ending this year’s festival seemed to close a circle; he addressed the crowd before playing, repeating a small ritual with two brandy glasses and saying he hoped to make our ears tingle. In a way, it was a fitting counterpart to the Klein symphony that opened the previous night: he filled the space with long chords that he would periodically adjust on the keys or the stops for varying harmonic density and brilliance, creating moments of contrast by throwing himself foward onto the manuals to produce dense clusters, then relaxing and letting harmony return. He might even be mellowing in old age, as towards the end he began working in some brief cadential motives in the bass, with some upper movement that could have been prodded into melody.
Besides James Clarke’s string quartet mentioned last time, the Sunday concert also featured Apartment House performing the premiere of Laura Steenberge’s I Only Have Eye For You. It’s a peculiar but mesmerising work, taking her signature blend of acoustic sound and dissasociated theatrical activity but on this occasion producing something that seemed to unfold as a single, integrated action, curiously purposeful even as it seemed to defy interpretation, in spite of the programme note alluding to Greek mythology. A string trio present but never quite complete, each member rotating between instruments while also attending to a funnel filled with sand cascading into a plastic pail, exchanging pails to ensure the funnel remained filled. The strings provided fragile continuity to the near-inaudible but constant backdrop; the percussion throughout the piece acted as both stabiliser and disruption at once, with knotted fabrics and a cymbal used in various ways to provide small, almost inadvertent sounds later on as the piece continued to evolve.
Focusing on the music-music, on Saturday night Lisa Streich’s KIND for prepared acoustic guitar, play by Jacob Kellermann, seemed to almost get lost in all the bustle: it makes itself seem smaller and thinner than it is. Streich requires metal strips and a small wire grill to be attached to the strings and soundboard, rendering much of the piece’s Spanish-influenced classical gestures to sound as tiny, high-pitched chimes, while other notes are filtered through to sound at normal register, but blurred and distant. The LCMF Orchestra’s premiere of Sofia Jernberg’s The murals in Quinta del Sordo was game in its evocation of rough textures in a disjointed series of tableaux, but the piece suffered from a recurring use of awkward stage business which added a comedic element that detracted from the music. Jernberg also suffered from her piece inadvertently following both Our Wits About Us and Laurence Crane’s Composition for Orchestra no. 5, with which it happened to share several distinctive elements. It could come across better given different staging in another context.
Which brings us to Crane’s Composition for Orchestra no. 5 ‘In Hackney’: the piece is a stunner. It begins in a strikingly uncharacteristic way, with the orchestra members all playing small, untuned, hand-held percussive objects. You think it’s a nice little opening gesture, but it keeps going. The gentle noise rises and falls in calm antiphony, amid repeated fake-outs that the real music is about to begin. It’s entirely unlike anything I’ve heard from Crane before, to the point you wonder if the piece and the title are some big Fluxus-inspired feint, in keeping with the Festival’s theme. Just as you’ve accepted the piece as a well-crafted essay in orchestrated white noise, a big Haydn-type cadence swells up. There’s no follow-through and the gentle noise continues. You’re now convinced the piece is a witty postmodern spoof; soon after you begin to realise you were wrong again. It’s just occurred to me that Crane’s method here resembles that of Lutosławski: you’re getting into the music when he suddenly reveals that he’s just been laying out his basic materials, and then he really goes to town. ‘In Hackney’ is utterly different yet entirely in keeping with Crane’s aesthetic, while pushing that line of clear musical thinking into new territory with more complex cognitive ramifications for the listener.
It’s a fitting title. I dischi di Angelica seem to have been on hiatus for a few years but returned with some new releases in 2019. The label, dedicated to recordings of live gigs from the AngelicA Festival in Bologna, has put out a succession of eclectic and surprising discs, the latest of which is an absolute pearler. aaangelicaaa may 10th. 2015 captures a gig on said date by the Zipangu Ensemble, a small orchestra of string instruments playing one half-hour piece each by Charlemagne Palestine and Cassandra Miller. That may seem an odd pairing at first (although Palestine must be used to it) but both share a trait of messing with your head, big time. Palestine does it overtly, while Miller is more insidious.
Strummmmminggg for Stringggggsss N Thingggggsss is a reworking of of Palestine’s venerable Strumming Music from the early 70s. If you’re familiar with the string ensemble version of the piece included on the Sub Rosa reissue Strumming Music then you will not be fully prepared for this. Palestine begins solo, keening in falsetto over rubbed glasses; the strings come in lower pitched, with cellos and basses augmenting the violins. The heavier texture, with Palestine’s singing, creates a rich, complex drone that swells and heaves and, just as it seems to be dying away, is joined by prolonged rolls on a pair of tubular bells. There’s a manic energy in the sound and the gesture from the orchestra that matches Palestine’s solo performances.
Miller’s piece, A Large House, was written for string orchestra and is played here by a smaller ensemble. A bass drum rolls underneath the strings as they play a slow, descending glissando. The orchestra slides down, and down, and further down. Then they keep descending. An endless Shepard tone made rough and ragged by the strings, it simultaneously falls, collapses and sinks. When you think it can’t go any further, it just ploughs on remorselessly. Listening through it is like being caught in one of those looping panic dreams that never resolve, with that giddy sense of dread and perverse exhilaration. It has the psychoacoustic trippiness of the best drone while acting as an aural Rorschach blot for the listener’s subconscious. Cranked up loud, it is a face-melting experience.
The live recording sounds great; my only niggle is that the applause is left in at the end of each piece, when it could have been set aside as separate tracks.
There’s a bunch of stuff I need to catch up on but first I have to talk about the Charlemagne Palestine and Oren Ambarchi gig at Cafe Oto last week. I really have a problem with this type of “hey let’s take two musicians who have never worked together before and y’know like throw them together and then sit back and like watch the Magic totally happen” gig. It’s too much like there’s a curator in the background hoping to pick up the kudos if it somehow works. Never mind; I fuelled up on Beerlao from the cornershop and went anyway, largely because I had no idea what was going to happen.
Yeah yeah, there were the obligatory stuffed toys and glasses of brandy, but the music had to be different. For starters, the piano at Oto ain’t no Bösendorfer Imperial. The evening began while the punters were filing in, with Palestine playing a steadily-building tidal wave of noise from his laptop. For the concert proper he played with his distinctively animalistic mix of single-mindedness and capriciousness. In between the expected periods of drumming away at sustained harmonic intervals on the piano, there were more laptop collages, occasional extended drones on cognac glasses, and in one or two places some La Monte Young/Terry Riley type singing.
Ambarchi, as he freely admitted afterwards, really had no idea what to expect coming in to this setup. His response to being put in this situation is what made the gig work so well. Both experienced musicians, displaying all the craft they’ve spent years developing, refused to bend too far from what they do best. Ambarchi would build up layers of amplifier hum and electrical crackle under Palestine’s piano, and then seize upon the slightest pause and shift the frequencies and harmonics, forcing Palestine to retreat momentarily, and then start over on a new tonal centre.
Throughout the gig Ambarchi kept provoking Palestine, most entertainingly when the older man at the piano tried to play conductor, barking at Ambarchi “Drums!… Drums!… Drums!” The latter took his sweet time about it, before finally reaching over to gently tap one of his cymbals.